The Spanish peacekeeper sighed as his convoy drove past yet another row of shattered homes in southern Lebanon. A building on the right had been destroyed in the previous three days, Lieutenant Colonel José Irisarri said, pointing to a mound of smashed concrete with a black flag jutting out of it.
“This one is from Monday,” he said, pointing out the window of his armoured white Toyota jeep at the next pile of rubble. A green plastic pot of red flowers, somehow unscathed by the explosion that destroyed the building behind it, served as a reminder that someone lived there once. “And that was hit last week,” Lt-Col. Irisarri said, gesturing at the remains of another building to his left.
The two-vehicle United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon convoy made its lonely patrol Friday through the detritus-strewn streets of Odaisseh, a town that sits flush against one of the most dangerous and disputed lines in the world: the Israel-Lebanon border. The next day, a rocket struck a soccer field in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, killing 12 children and bringing the region even closer to all-out war. (No one has claimed responsibility for the strike, although Israel blames Hezbollah.)
10km
Attacks since Oct. 7: 4,400
Israeli
LEBANON
Hezbollah
SYRIA
Khiam
Litani River
Ghajar
Tyre
Majdal Shams:
Rocket strikes
soccer field
killing 12
Odaisseh
Shebaa
Farms
IDF
evacuation
zone
UN-mandated
ceasefire zone
Nahariya
GOLAN
HEIGHTS
(Israeli-
occupied)
UN-drawn
blue line
Haifa
JORDAN
ISRAEL
the globe and mail, Sources: graphic news; Institute for
the Study of War, CSIS
10km
Attacks since Oct. 7: 4,400
Israeli
LEBANON
Hezbollah
SYRIA
Khiam
Litani River
Ghajar
Tyre
Odaisseh
Majdal Shams:
Rocket strikes
soccer field
killing 12
Shebaa
Farms
IDF
evacuation
zone
UN-mandated
ceasefire zone
Nahariya
GOLAN
HEIGHTS
(Israeli-
occupied)
UN-drawn
blue line
Haifa
JORDAN
ISRAEL
the globe and mail, Sources: graphic news; Institute for
the Study of War, CSIS
10km
Attacks since Oct. 7: 4,400
Israeli
LEBANON
Hezbollah
SYRIA
Khiam
Litani River
Ghajar
Tyre
Odaisseh
Majdal Shams:
Rocket strikes
soccer field
killing 12
Sheeba Farms
IDF
evacuation
zone
UN-mandated
ceasefire zone
Nahariya
GOLAN
HEIGHTS
(Israeli-
occupied)
UN-drawn
blue line
Haifa
ISRAEL
JORDAN
the globe and mail, Sources: graphic news; Institute for the Study of War, CSIS
If a major conflict does erupt, Lt-Col Irisarri and his fellow peacekeepers will be stuck in the middle of it, unable to intervene as an 18-year-old ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah collapses into all-out fighting.
Already it feels like there’s not much peace for UNIFIL – a 10,000-strong force made up of soldiers from 49 countries (though not Canada) – to keep.
Tit-for-tat fighting over the past 10 months has killed 387 Hezbollah fighters, according to the group, and more than 100 Lebanese civilians.
Twelve soldiers and 24 civilians have been killed on the Israeli side of the border, and tens of thousands have been evacuated from towns and villages on both sides of the border.
For 17 years – from the end of a 33-day war in 2006 between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, until last October – UNIFIL could claim to have helped ensure a relative calm in places like Odaisseh, even as the UN-drawn Blue Line that serves as the de facto border still has 13 points of dispute.
Then came the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, and Israel’s punitive invasion of the Gaza Strip. A day later, Hezbollah began firing missiles and drones across Israel’s northern border, drawing Israeli air strikes and artillery fire in response. Odaisseh, right on the frontline from the moment the shooting started (and with a population deeply sympathetic to Hezbollah) was soon all-but-deserted.
No one calls it a war, yet, because everyone knows the fighting could get far worse if Israel and Hezbollah opt for – or slide into – all out-conflict. Until Saturday, the exchanges of blows remained carefully calibrated, and contained to northern Israel and southern Lebanon.
This house in Kfar Kela is in ruins after an Israeli air strike. Cross-border fighting in this region has been intense since Hamas's attacks in Israel last October.
Lieutenant-Colonel José Irisarri says UNIFIL can do little about the conflict here except report what they see.
Neither side has attempted a land invasion. The big cities of Tel Aviv and Beirut have been largely spared thus far. But in the area where UNIFIL operates – south Lebanon between the Israeli border and the Litani River, 30 kilometres to the north – there has been not much peace to keep over the past 10 months. That leaves UNIFIL to simply drive around a dangerous war zone. “Observe and report. We can’t do anything else. It’s not our task,” said Lt-Col Irisarri, a 46-year-old veteran who served two tours with the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.
“Afghanistan was a different mission, really. Because there, if we were a target, we would react with fire. Here, if we are suffering a denial of movement, we can’t do anything, just report it to LAF,” he says, referring to the official Lebanese Armed Forces, which are all but absent from southern Lebanon. Denial of movement refers to situations where UNIFIL is prevented from entering an area.
Those calls to the Lebanese army rarely lead to action. UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which brought a halt to the hostilities in 2006 and called for a strengthened UNIFIL to help the LAF assert its authority in the region south of the Litani River, contained a fatal flaw. UNIFIL’s troops, even when they see an obvious violation of the 1701 – which calls for only UNIFIL and the Lebanese army to be present south of the Litani, and no militias such as Hezbollah or Hamas – can only act when they are specifically requested to do so.
And the lightly armed Lebanese army – which gets its direction from a government in Beirut that’s deferential to Hezbollah – has no interest in provoking a clash with the Iranian-backed militia. Even if it did, there’s little question that Hezbollah, which fought the Israelis to a standstill in 2006, and helped tip Syria’s civil war in favour of dictator Bashar al-Assad, is stronger than the poorly equipped LAF.
Any inter-Lebanese clashes could quickly split the country and its military along sectarian lines, with many Shia Muslims siding with Hezbollah. A recent poll found that 85 per cent of the country’s Shiites – who make up roughly 50 per cent of the population – said they either “trusted” or “greatly trusted” Hezbollah. But less than 10 per cent among each of the country’s Sunni Muslim, Christians and Druze communities said the same.
Memories of the country’s 1975-1990 civil war have kept Lebanon’s Sunni, Christian and Druze parties from confronting Hezbollah. “The worst thing the Lebanese remember is the civil war. They don’t want to start another one,” said Avraham Levine, the director of educational programs at the Alma Research and Education Centre, an Israeli think tank that studies the security situation on the Israel-Lebanon border. As a result, 1701 was “a complete failure,” Mr. Levine said.
Spokesman Andrea Tenenti acknowledged that UNIFIL's mandate has limits, but without it, things could get worse in southern Lebanon.
UNIFIL spokesman Andrea Tenenti said that while 1701 had been “challenged” over the past 10 months, it was still helping keep the region from sliding into something worse. “Think about this area, if there was no international presence at all, what could have happened,” he said in an interview at UNIFIL headquarters in the border town of Naqoura, interrupted by sirens indicating the possibility of incoming fire. It was a Level 2 alert, meaning that all UNIFIL patrols had to return to base until the all-clear was sounded. (A more serious Level 3 alert would have sent all UNIFIL staff into the nearest bunker.)
It’s a protocol that both Hezbollah and the Israeli military know well after 18 years. Last week, a drone dropped a grenade 20 metres from a Spanish observation post overlooking the juncture of Lebanon, Israel and the Golan Heights. A Level 3 alert was declared, and the peacekeepers went into their bunkers.
Though UNIFIL’s cameras were still active, there were fewer international eyes on whatever happened next. Two days later, another grenade was dropped 50 metres from the same post, forcing the Spanish to again take shelter. “Both parties don’t want us to have very powerful surveillance,” said Captain Alfonso Alban, the commander of the observation post. He said that while the peacekeepers didn’t know for sure who was behind the incidents, “I don’t think Israel is going to make the mistake of attacking this position. But sometimes NSAs attempt false-flag attacks.”
NSAs refers to non-state actors. In south Lebanon, that usually means Hezbollah, or perhaps Hamas, which has an armed presence in the Palestinian refugee camps in the country.
But UNIFIL can’t know for sure. Though Mr. Tenenti insists there aren’t any no-go zones for the peacekeepers in south Lebanon, the Spanish zone of patrol includes the hilltop town of Khiam, which the peacekeepers say they have been prevented from entering by the town’s mayor, who is affiliated with the Amal movement, a political ally of Hezbollah. “It’s quite a strange situation. The mayor always says he is a friend of UNIFIL, but he doesn’t want us to patrol,” said Lt-Col Irisarri. And so, without a request from the Lebanese government or military to force their way into Khiam, the Spanish bypass it on their patrols.
Khiam has been a regular target of Israeli fire throughout the conflict. In 2006, four UN observers, including Canadian Major Paeta Hess-von Kruedener, were killed by an Israeli airstrike on their bunker. Israel said the strike was an accident, and that they had been targeting Hezbollah fighters in the vicinity.
For decades, peacekeepers and international justice have been the main tools the international community has had at its disposal when trying to bring peace to a region at war. They have largely worked in the Balkans – where UN troops were deployed between the warring sides of the 1990s, and the likes of Slobodan Milosevic and Ratko Mladic wound up before tribunals in The Hague – though the same mechanisms failed to prevent the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and several key suspects in those mass killings have never faced trial.
Three decades on, the same tools are failing across the Middle East. Not only is UNIFIL forced to watch as Israel and Hezbollah trade blows, the International Criminal Court looked powerless last week as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who has been accused by ICC prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan of war crimes, including the starvation and intentional targeting of civilians in Gaza – was not only invited to speak to U.S. Congress, but given a series of standing ovations.
Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, meanwhile, showed its contempt for another Hague-based institution, the International Court of Justice, when it passed a resolution rejecting the establishment of a Palestinian state one day before the ICJ ruled that Israel’s 57-year-old occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem was illegal and should end “as rapidly as possible.”
Protesters demonstrate in The Hague this past May outside the International Court of Justice, whose rulings against Israel have gone unheeded by the Netanyahu government.Johanna Geron/Reuters
Hezbollah, too, has long flouted international law. Four of its members were convicted by a UN-backed special tribunal in the 2005 car bomb killing of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, but the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah – who many believe would need to have approved the assassination – refused to hand them over to serve their life sentences. Many Lebanese also hold Hezbollah at least partially responsible for a 2020 explosion in the port of Beirut that killed at least 218 people when a stockpile of ammonium nitrate – likely used for the group’s weapons – detonated. The official investigation into the disaster has collapsed.
Lebanese civil society has been pushing for international justice to step in where the state has failed. In the wake of an Israeli shelling in south Lebanon on Oct. 13, 2023, that killed a Reuters journalist, Lebanon’s Ministry of Information sought advice on how Lebanon could follow in the Palestinian Authority’s steps in granting the ICC jurisdiction over suspected war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on its territory.
The Lebanese cabinet met in April and instructed the foreign ministry to give the ICC jurisdiction over everything that had happened since Oct. 8. That enthusiasm for international justice died on May 20, when Mr. Khan, the ICC prosecutor, announced he was seeking arrest warrants for not only Mr. Netanyahu and his defence minister, but also three senior Hamas leaders. Nine days later, the Lebanese government dropped its plans to call in the ICC.
“Nasrallah, Hezbollah could have really taken this opportunity to say: ‘We have adopted this resolution, because we want these Israeli leaders prosecuted in the International Criminal Court,’” said human-rights lawyer Diala Chehade, who drafted the initial advice to the Ministry of Information. “But maybe Hezbollah just don’t want to see prosecutions, another new investigation on an international level.”
Hezbollah’s hold over Lebanon is such that the country has been without a president for 21 months. Though the post is constitutionally reserved for a Christian (as part of the power-sharing arrangement that ended the civil war), who is to be elected by parliament, Hezbollah has refused to consider anyone but its favoured candidate, Suleiman Frangieh, a Christian who is close to Syria’s Mr. Assad. Twelve attempts to elect someone else have failed as Hezbollah and its allies have walked out of parliament each time, denying quorum.
The coffins of Amira and Hassan Fadlallah, aged 6 and 10, are carried through the streets of southern Beirut before their burial on July 31. They were killed in an Israeli strike on a residential building.
Israel, meanwhile, is still led by the unpopular Mr. Netanyahu, who has been widely accused of prolonging the Gaza war to avoid an election. On Monday, far-right protesters stormed a military base in central Israel, demanding the release of nine reservist soldiers who had been arrested in connection with the torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners. Israel’s Interior Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right ally of Mr. Netanyahu, was accused of aiding the rioters by delaying the police response to the scene, a moment some in Israel compared to the Jan. 6, 2021, riots in Washington D.C.
“We are not on the brink of the abyss, we are in the abyss. All red lines were crossed today,” Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid wrote on X. “Ministers who participate in the invasion of violent militias into military bases are a message to the State of Israel: they are done with democracy, they are done with the rule of law.”
“I don’t know what’s happening in this region,” sighed Farouk el-Moghraby, a prominent Lebanese lawyer. “It’s like we’re in a movie like The Godfather, where everyone is a bad guy.”
For all their flaws, UNIFIL and Resolution 1701 may yet provide a way out of the latest conflict. On Sunday, as Israeli anger rose over the strike on Majdal Shams, Lebanon’s Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib said Hezbollah was “ready to withdraw behind the Litani if Israel stops its violations.”
It wasn’t clear if Mr. Bou Habib – a technocrat with no overt political affiliation – was indeed speaking for the militant group, or what “violations” Israel would have to cease as part of a deal. But it served as a reminder that most Lebanese want to avert another war, and 1701 provides the only ready way out.
Mr. Levine, the Israeli expert on the northern border, said Israel could likely concede 11 of the 13 points of contention along the Blue Line if it meant a genuine Hezbollah withdrawal from the border area. But it would be more difficult for Mr. Netanyahu’s government to withdraw from the town of Ghajar – which the Blue Line runs right through, and which Israel has occupied the northern half of since 2006 – and the Shebaa Farms, a strategic plateau. “If they have it, they control the northern Galilee. If we have it, we control the valley north of Metula,” Mr. Levine said.
And what does it mean for Hezbollah to withdraw north of the Litani River? It could stage a showy withdrawal of some of its heavier weapons, but – as with Hamas in Gaza – it’s impossible to completely remove a movement that has the support of the majority of those who live in the area. “Hezbollah are not a group of Martians that came to Lebanon,” said Mr. Tenenti, the UNIFIL spokesperson. “They are citizens of the south, so the solutions are not easy.”
And afterward? When the fighting stops, will accountability finally come to Israel, Gaza and Lebanon? Will Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Gallant and the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah ever be brought to account by the ICC or other mechanisms?
Experience has taught those who live in this region to be pessimistic. “People have lost faith in the international legal order and the international legal system,” said Aya Majzoub, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa division of Amnesty International. “It started long before Oct. 7, but people don’t believe that anybody committing crimes in Gaza or South Lebanon today is actually going to be held accountable.”
